1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to an electronic system that supports reading and browsing. In particular, this invention is directed to an electronic system that facilitates navigation from an index to portions of a document or documents that are of interest to the user using freeform digital ink annotations.
2. Description of Related Art
Browsing through documents is an important information exploration activity. It is typically accomplished through hypertext links that take the reader from one page (or concept) to another. Other navigation techniques that support browsing behavior rely on queries to establish connections between information nodes. One such navigation technique is described in What the Query Told the Link: The Integration of Hypertext and Information Retrieval, by Golovchinsky G., Proceedings of Hypertext ""97, ACM Press, pp. 67-74. These techniques are based upon computing the similarity between passages or documents based on the terms they contain as the user selects portions of those documents. Another approach to supporting navigation based on statistical similarity measures is based on the metaphor of the xe2x80x9cback of the bookxe2x80x9d index.
Traditional xe2x80x9cback of the bookxe2x80x9d indexes are used to locate concepts that are present in the text. It is possible to generate such indexes automatically based upon a combination of statistical and linguistic techniques. Examples of these techniques are described in The Hypertext Concordance: A Better Back-of-the-Book Index, by Schuetze H., in Proceedings of Computerm ""98, pp 101-104 and in Automatic Hypertext Construction, by Allan J., PhD dissertation, Cornell University, January 1995. These indexes can be constructed for a single document or for a collection of documents. They can also be tailored to the interest of particular users.
Conventional indexes do not provide a means for quickly and easily determining which portions of a document may be more relevant than another. Typically, a user selects a term in an index and explores each individual occurrence of that term in the document a single occurrence at a time. Additionally, although the index may provide the passage in which the term is found, the frequency or position of the term in that passage is not conveyed or easily comprehended by the user.
Freeform digital ink annotation systems are known. One freeform digital ink annotation system is described in Beyond Paper: Supporting Active Reading with Free-form Digital Ink Annotations, In Proceedings of CHI ""98, ACM Press. This system uses freeform digital ink to compute queries using entire sentences or paragraphs that are implicitly selected by the ink. This freeform digital ink annotation system is also described in Linking BY Inking: Trailblazing in a Paper-Like Hypertext, by Morgan Price, Gene Golovchinsky and William Schilit, In Proceedings of Hypertext ""98, Pittsburgh, Pa., Jun. 20-23, 1998, pp. 30-39, ACM Press. This system enables the creation of links between objects using freeform digital ink annotation.
An exemplary embodiment of the method and system of this invention facilitates navigation from an index to portions of a document that are of interest to a user using freeform digital ink. A user can mark terms in an index page using freeform digital ink and the freeform digital ink mark is copied to instances of the annotated terms that occur in the document. A user can quickly gain a sense of the distribution of a term within a document. The user can acquire this sense because the freeform digital ink marks are copied throughout the document over each instance of an annotated term. The embodiment provides a view of the document with thumbnail views of individual pages in the document. In this view, the annotations are clearly identifiable even though the underlying text may not be legible. The visual pattern of freeform digital ink marks in the thumbnail images then indicates where terms occur and can assist the user in deciding which portion of a document or documents to read.
Additionally, by making a variety of different types and styles of freeform digital ink marks in the index, the relationships between terms in a document can be more quickly comprehended by a user. The use of freeform digital ink for the marks allows the user to distinguish terms in a document without requiring the user to read the terms in the document. Rather, the user merely has to recognize the mark.
Furthermore, combinations of shapes and colors can be used for the freeform digital ink marks to create a large number of identifiable terms. A set of personalized freeform digital ink marks may also be created and projected onto a new document.
Conventional systems do not treat a user""s freeform digital ink mark in a single place, such as an index, as a prototype for marks in other places. While the prototype-instance instantiation mechanism is well known in object-oriented languages, no system has combined freeform digital ink annotations, xe2x80x9cback of the bookxe2x80x9d indexes, and the prototype-instance inheritance model in a single user interface.